Snowbound

Twenty-Four

They heard inside the church the initial exchange of shots, and they heard the accelerated whine of the snowmobile’s engine, and they heard those final three, close-spaced reports beyond the south wall. A kind of breathless paralysis succeeded the first and carried them through the second, but when the last came and was followed by silence from without, the thin edge of panic finally crumbled away.

Bodies massed confusedly toward the front; there was a rising torrent of sounds and cries. Ann’s newborn daughter began to wail. Gibbering, Frank McNeil stumbled onto the pulpit and tried to force his way into the vestry past Joe Garvey; Garvey threw him against the wall, hit him in the stomach in a release of pent-up emotion, and McNeil went down gasping and moaning and lay with his hands over his head. Coopersmith stood back hard against the entrance doors, arms spread, and shouted, “Stay calm, for God’s sake stay calm, we don’t know what’s happening, we’ve got enough people hurt as it is!”

They didn’t listen to him; they did not even hear him. They had lived in fear of the worst for all the long, long hours, and they expected the worst now. Have to get out! their faces said. Going to be killed anyway, have to get out…

Heavy footfalls on the stairs outside-and then a voice, a voice wearily raised no more than a few decibels above normal but still loud enough so that almost everyone could hear it and recognize it. That voice did what no other but one could have: it froze them all in place again, it stilled them, it transformed terror into incipient relief.

“This is Cain,” the voice said. “This is Cain, I’ve got the key and I’m going to open the doors, give me room.”

Key scraping the lock as Coopersmith swept them back, clearing space; doors opening.

Cain stood there with his feet braced apart and the limp form of John Tribucci cradled close to his chest. “They’re dead, all three of them,” he said. “You’re free now, they’re dead.”

And the people of Hidden Valley surged around him like waves around a pinnacle of rock.